Blasphemy wf-2 Read online

  As the bike came to a stop he extended two leather-booted legs, steadied the bike, and grinned. “Pastor Eddy?”

  His heart hammering, Eddy stepped forward. “Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ.”

  The man kicked down the kickstand, rose from his bike—he was enormous—and walked toward Eddy with his arms thrown wide. He enveloped Eddy in a dusty embrace, his body odor overpowering, and then stepped back, gripping him affectionately by his shoulders. “Randy Doke.” He gave Eddy another hug. “Oh, man, am I really the first?”

  “You are.”

  “I can’t believe I made it. When I saw your letter, I hopped on my Kawasaki and came up from Holbrook. Cross-country, over the desert, cutting fences and riding like hell. Woulda been here sooner, but I took a spill back near Second Mesa. I can’t believe I’m here. Oh, man, I can’t believe it.”

  Eddy felt a rush of faith, an inpouring of energy.

  The man looked around. “So—what now?”

  “Let’s pray.” He clasped Doke’s rough hands, and they bowed their heads. “Lord God Almighty, please surround us with Thine angels, wingtip to wingtip, with their swords drawn to protect us, so that they can lead us, Thy servants, into victory against the Antichrist. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  “Amen, brother.”

  The man had a deep, resonant voice that Eddy found reassuring, magnetic. Here was the kind of man who knew what to do.

  Doke went back to his bike, pulled a rifle out of a leather scabbard hanging off the seat, and slung it over his back. Hauling out a bandolier packed with rounds, he tossed it over the other shoulder, which gave him the look of an old-time guerrilla warrior. He shot Eddy a grin and saluted. “Brother Randy, reporting for service in God’s army!”

  More headlights approached—slowly, uncertainly. A dusty Jeep, top down, stopped next to them. A man and a woman in their thirties climbed out. Eddy opened his arms and took them in, first the man, then the woman. They both began to cry, their tears making tracks down their dusty faces.

  “Greetings in Christ.”

  The man was wearing a business suit covered in dust. He carried a Bible. Tucked into his belt was a big kitchen knife. The woman had pinned little pieces of paper to her blouse, which fluttered as she walked. Eddy saw they were Bible verses and slogans: Trust and obey . . . . Go ye into all the world . . . . For lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth . . .. “Grabbed them off the refrigerator,” she said. She reached into the Jeep and fetched out a baseball bat.

  “We prayed and prayed, but we couldn’t decide,” the man said. “Did God mean us to fight with His Word, or did He mean us to use real weapons?”

  They stood in front of Eddy, awaiting for orders.

  “No mistake about it,” Eddy said. “This is going to be a battle. A real battle.”

  “I’m glad we brought these.”

  “A lot of people are going to be coming down that road,” Eddy continued. “Thousands, probably. We need a place to gather everyone together, to prepare. A staging ground. That’ll be that area, off to the right.” He gestured toward the vast expanse of slickrock and sand, pale in the light of the lopsided moon rising over the lip of the mesa. “Randy, God brought you to me first for a reason. You’re my right-hand man. My general. You and I will gather everyone over there and plan our . . . our assault.” It was hard to say the word, now that it was actually happening.

  Randy nodded sharply, without speaking. Eddy noticed wetness around his eyes, too. He felt profoundly moved.

  “You two need to block this road with your Jeep to prevent anyone from going on to Isabella. We need the element of surprise. Direct everyone off the road and have them park in that open area over there. Randy and I will be on that hill. Waiting. We’re not moving on Isabella until we have sufficient force.”

  More sets of headlights appeared at the lip of the Dugway.

  “Isabella is about three miles down that road. We want to keep quiet until it’s time to move. Make sure no one jumps the gun or goes off half-cocked. We don’t want the Antichrist knowing we’re coming until we’ve got strength in numbers.”

  “Amen,” they said.

  Eddy smiled. Amen.

  56

  AT 2:00 A.M., THE REVEREND DON T. Spates sat at the desk in his office behind the Silver Cathedral. Several hours earlier he had called Charles and his secretary at their homes and asked them to come in to handle all the calls and e-mails. In front of him stood a stack of e-mails Charles had culled out before his mail server crashed. Next to them was a stack of phone messages. He could hear the phone ringing incessantly in the outer office.

  Spates was trying to absorb the momentous thing that was happening.

  A light tap on the door, and his secretary entered with fresh coffee. She placed it on the table, along with a china plate with a macadamia-nut cookie.

  “I don’t want the cookie.”

  “Yes, Reverend.”

  “And stop answering the phone. Take it off the hook.”

  “Yes, Reverend.” Plate and cookie disappeared with the secretary. With irritation, he watched her retreat; her hair wasn’t as bouffant and sparkly as usual, her dress was wrinkled, and without makeup her true frumpiness showed plainly. She must have been in bed when he called, but still, she should have made a better effort.

  When the door closed, he slipped a bottle of vodka from a locked drawer and splashed some into the coffee. Then he turned back to his computer. His Web site had also crashed under the weight of traffic, and now it seemed the whole Web was getting sluggish. With difficulty he trolled slowly through the familiar Christian sites. Some of the big ones, like raptureready.com, had also crashed. Others were as slow as molasses in Alaska. The uproar Eddy’s letter had generated was astonishing. What few Christian chat rooms were still functioning were jammed with hysterical people. Many said they were leaving to respond to the call.

  Spates sweated heavily, despite the coolness of the room, and his collar itched. Eddy’s letter, which he must have read twenty times now, had frightened him. The letter was an incitement to a violent attack on a U.S. government installation and he had named Spates in the letter. Naturally, they would blame him. On the other hand, Spates reasoned, this immense display of Christian power, of Christian outrage, might be for the good. For too long, Christians had been discriminated against in their own country, ignored, sidelined, and mocked. Right or wrong, this uproar would be a wake-up call to America. The politicians and the government would finally see the power of the Christian majority. And he, Spates, had set the revolution in motion. Robertson, Falwell, Swaggart—in all their years of preaching and with all their money and power, none of them had pulled off anything like this.

  Spates surfed the Web, looking for information, but all he could find was vitriol, outrage, and hysteria. And thousands of copies of the letter.

  A new and disturbing idea suddenly infiltrated his mind as he glanced through the letter yet again.

  What if Eddy is right?

  He felt a sudden chill. He wasn’t ready to let go of this life. He couldn’t bear the thought that all his money, his power, his cathedral, his teleministry might be coming to an end—that it would all be over, before it had hardly begun.

  An even more unsettling thought came hard on the heels of this one: in that great and glorious day of the Lord, how would he be judged? Was he truly right with God? All Spates’s sins lurched forward to haunt him. The lies, the binges, the betrayals, the women and the flashy gifts he had bought for them with contributions from the faithful. Most horrifying of all, he recalled the way he’d more than once caught himself lusting after a boy in the street. All those sins—large and small—pushed in from the edges of his mind, shouting to be seen and reexamined.

  Fear, guilt, and despair swept over him. God saw everything. Everything. Please, Lord, please, forgive me, Thy unworthy servant, he prayed, over and over, until, with a violent mental effort, he shoved his sins back into some d
ark cave in his brain. God had already forgiven him—why was he concerned?

  And anyway, this couldn’t be the Second Coming. What the hell was he thinking? Eddy was a nutcase. Of course he was. Spates had known it from the moment he first heard that high, cracked voice on the phone. Anyone who would live in the middle of the desert with a bunch of Indians, a hundred miles from a decent restaurant, was by definition crazy.

  He read the man’s letter again, looking for signs of insanity, and a fresh wave of dread hit him. The letter made sense. It was powerful. These were not the ravings of a madman. And this business of “ARIZONA” and “ISABELLA” each adding up to 666 was the most unsettling of all.

  God, how he was sweating.

  He opened the glass doors of the cherrywood bookcase, removed a thick book, and flipped through to the gematria tables. He looked up the Hebrew letters and jotted their numbers on a piece of paper. As he worked, he saw that Eddy had gotten some of his Hebrew letters wrong and misnumbered others.

  He applied the correct numbers and added them up with a shaking hand. Neither word came to 666.

  He sat back, gasping with relief. The whole thing was a farce, just as he’d thought. He felt as if an angel had swooped down and lifted him out of the burning lake. Jerking a linen handkerchief from his pocket, he mopped the sweat off from around his eyes and forehead.

  Apprehension returned. God might have spared him. But would the media? Would the government? Could he be charged with incitement to violence? Or worse? He’d better pull his lawyer out of bed while he still could. There had to be a way to push the blame onto Crawley. It was Crawley, after all, who had started it.

  He pulled at his collar, trying to get some air down his hot, sticky neck. It had been a mistake to bring in that damn cracker, Pastor Eddy. The guy was a loose cannon. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  He pressed the button on his intercom. “Charles, I need you.”

  The usually prompt young man did not appear.

  “Charles? I need you.”

  His secretary opened the door instead. She looked more haggard than he had ever seen her.

  “Charles left,” she said in a flat voice.

  “I certainly didn’t give him leave to go.”

  “He went to Isabella.”

  Spates stared up at her from his chair. He couldn’t believe it. Charles?

  “He left about ten minutes ago. He said he’d been called by God. Then he walked out.”

  “For crying out loud!” Spates slammed his hand on the desk. Then he noticed she was wearing her coat and had her purse. “Don’t tell me you’re also going off to follow that jackass!”

  “No,” she said. “I’m going home.”

  “I’m sorry, but that won’t be possible. I need you here for the rest of the night. Get my lawyer, Ralph Dobson, on the phone. Tell him to get down here pronto. I’ve got a problem on my hands, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “No.”

  “No? ‘No’ what? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t care to work for you any longer, Mr. Spates.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She clasped her purse in two hands in front of her midriff as if for protection. “Because you’re a despicable human being.” She turned stiffly and left.

  Spates heard the faint sound of a door being closed carefully—then silence.

  He sat behind his desk, alone, streaming sweat—and very, very frightened.

  57

  THE WORD “ASSAULT” HUNG HEAVY IN the air. The others crowded in and watched the main security screen. It was a live feed from a high-angle camera mounted on top of the elevator and it gave a bird’s-eye view of what was going on. At the edge of the cliffs above Isabella, Ford could make out a group of black-suited men setting up fixed ropes and stacking equipment and weapons. They were clearly getting ready to rappel down. Kate moved next to him, and took his hand again. Hers was sweaty, trembling.

  George Innes broke the horrified silence. “Assault? What the hell for?”

  “They couldn’t contact us,” said Wardlaw. “And this is their response.”

  “This is an absurd overreaction!”

  Wardlaw turned to Dolby. “Ken, we need to restore communications right away and call this off.”

  “I can’t do that without shutting down Isabella. As you well know, Isabella is totally firewalled to the outside. The programming simply won’t let us turn on the communications system until Isabella is shut down.”

  “Restart the main computer and transfer control from the servers.”

  “It would take at least an hour to boot up and reconfigure the mainframe.”

  Wardlaw swore. “All right, then, I’ll go up top, explain the situation in person.” He turned toward the door.

  “You’ll do no such thing,” said Hazelius.

  Wardlaw stared at him. “Sir, I don’t understand.”

  Hazelius pointed mutely away from Wardlaw’s station toward the screen overhead. A new message had materialized.

  We have very little time. What I have to say to you now is of the utmost importance.

  Wardlaw looked at Hazelius in panic. His eyes swiveled to the security screens and back again. “We can’t keep them out, sir. I’ve got to open the security door.”

  “Tony,” said Hazelius, his voice low and urgent, “think for just a moment about what’s going on here. You open that door and this conversation with . . . God or whatever it is comes to an end.”

  Wardlaw’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “God?”

  “That’s right, Tony. God . It’s a very real possibility. We’ve made contact with God, except it’s a God who’s a whole lot bigger and more unknowable than anything dreamed up by humanity.”

  Nobody spoke.

  Hazelius went on. “Tony, we can buy ourselves a little time, and it won’t cost us. We’ll tell them the door wasn’t functioning, the communications systems were down, the computer crashed. We can finesse this. We can keep the doors shut and still come out of this without serious charges.”

  “They’ll have a demolition kit. They’ll blow the door,” said Wardlaw, his voice high and tense.

  “Let them,” said Hazelius. He grasped Wardlaw’s shoulder gently, gave it an affectionate shake, as if to wake him up. “Tony, Tony. We might be talking to God . Don’t you understand?”

  Wardlaw said, after a moment, “I understand.”

  Hazelius looked around. “Are we all in this together?” His eyes traveled around the room and locked on Ford. He must have seen the skepticism in Ford’s eyes. “Wyman?”

  Ford said, “I’m astonished you think there’s a possibility we may be talking to God.”

  “If not God, then who is it?” Hazelius asked.

  Ford glanced around at the others. He wondered who else could see that Hazelius was finally losing it. “Just what you’ve said all along. A fraud. Sabotage.”

  Melissa Corcoran suddenly spoke up. “If that’s what you still think, Wyman, then I’m sorry for you.”

  Ford turned to her, astonished. There was a new look in her face that stopped him. Gone was the insecure young woman restlessly seeking affection. She looked radiantly serene, her eyes flashing with self-confidence.

  “You think this is God?” Ford asked incredulously.

  “I don’t know why you’re so surprised,” she said. “Don’t you believe in God?”

  “Yes, but not this God!”

  “How do you know?”

  Ford faltered. “Come on! God would never contact us in this crazy way.”

  “You think it’s less crazy for God to impregnate a virgin who produces a son who then brings the message to Earth?”

  Ford could hardly believe his ears. “I’m telling you, this is not God.”

  Corcoran shook her head. “Wyman, don’t you realize what’s happened here? Don’t you get it? We’ve made the greatest scientific discovery of all time: We’ve discovered God.”

  Ford look
ed about the group. His eyes ended up locked into Kate’s, standing next to him. For a long moment they looked at each other. He could hardly believe what he saw: her eyes were brimming with emotion. She squeezed his hand, dropped it, and smiled. “I’m sorry, Wyman. You know Melissa and I don’t always see eye to eye. But now . . . well.” She reached out and clasped Corcoran’s hand. “I agree with her.”

  Ford stared at the two adversaries suddenly together. “How could a rational human being possibly think that . . . thing ”—he pointed at the screen—“is God?”

  “What surprises me,” Kate said, her voice calm, “is that you don’t see it. Review the evidence. The space-time hole. It’s real. I did the calculations. It’s a wormhole or a flux tube into a parallel universe—a universe that exists right next to ours, incredibly close, almost but not quite touching, our two universes like two sheets of paper that have been balled up together. All we did was poke a hole through our piece of paper to expose a tiny piece of the one next to us. And that parallel universe is where . . . God lives.”

  “Kate, you can’t be serious.”

  “Wyman, forget everything else and just listen to the words. Just the words . This is the first time in my life that I’ve actually heard the simple truth spoken. It’s like the pealing ofbells after years ofsilence. What this . . . what God is saying is just so incredibly true.”

  Ford looked around the circular room and fixed on Edelstein. Edelstein, the ultimate skeptic. The man’s dark, triumphant eyes returned the look.

  “Alan, help me out here.”

  “I’ve never shopped around for God,” Edelstein said. “I’ve been a resolute atheist all my life. I don’t need God—never have, never will.”

  “At least someone agrees with me,” said Ford with relief.

  Edelstein smiled. “Which makes my conversion all the more telling.”

  “Your conversion?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You . . . believe ?”